


[EMPTY SPEECH BUBBLE.]

by NeoQwerty



Series: Bendings Of The Light [3]
Category: Elder Scrolls, The Elder Scrolls - Fandom
Genre: Author Is Playing With Lore Like Vivec Does, Cyrus Is The HoonDing (Absolutely), Gen, I Reject MK's Ending And Substitute My Own, Nerevar Becomes A God, Nerevar Is Sithis (Maybe?), Numidium Gets Pankratosworded - Khajiti-Style, Sotha Sil Becomes A God, Sotha Sil Is Magnus (Probably), The Nerevarine Is Nerevar Reborn, Three Tricky Swordsmen Kill Universal Entropy, Vivec And Cyrus Make Nerevar A Sword-Saint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:05:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27440125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeoQwerty/pseuds/NeoQwerty
Summary: GHARTOKTHE SELF-HELD WEAPON, DIRECTED BY THE MASTER OF THE NEXT CYCLEFOR HE WHO DESTROYS ALONE CHOOSES WHAT WILL REMAIN, AND WHAT MUST BE MADE ANEWHE IS THE ONLY JUDGE IN THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT, FOR HE ALONE CAN GRASP THE GODKILLER BLADEHE IS MARKED WITH THE SHAPE OF HIS OWN SELF SO THAT THOSE WITH INSIGHT MAY KNOW HIMAND TEST HIM UNTIL ALL TREACHEROUS DESIRE HAS BEEN CUT AWAY
Series: Bendings Of The Light [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1963096





	[EMPTY SPEECH BUBBLE.]

At his right, a god of Move-When-I-Make-Way.

At his left, a god of Letters-Written-In-Uncertainty.

Below him, the Heart of a world at war.

Above him, the Senses of a mesmerized witness.

Around him, the perfect stillness of the Void.

And before him is something

is something that hurts

that hurts to

hurts to think

to think of directly

An absolute negation of all that exists, blinking in and out of being as it shifts through time and space.  
A giant of bronze, sheathed in a skin made of tormented Dwemer souls, fed their own agony in a downward spiral of hatred.  
A God whose only purpose is to be abused and misused and misinterpreted as a victory when it really is horrifying defeat.

And before him is a

is a mirage that he sees

he sees right through

right through and stares into

stares into the and

and blinks

He sees through a numinous aggregate of eyes, insect-lenses scattered through time and space and bloodlines. He remembers being born of lunar languages and torn unwilling from a biting maw, remembers black-burned hands and unyielding chrome and brilliant lightning assembling a misshapen, snaking path with uncertainty and hope for stone and mortar, and the many faces and worlds he has walked since.

He looks into the eyes of denial, and _smiles_ because he sees Numidium for what it is: a lifeless construct of melted world-pieces held together by an oversoul-skin of denial, especially of its own impossibility. He knows that wearing this soul-scaled snake-skin means that it is empty within and can only oppose him with Nature without Will.

He flexes his hands, newly remade and unkissed by time, and embraces that he bears in them the marks of destruction and death, the GHARTOKI that display his nature as the ending of a story, as the invitation to _begin anew_. He knows that the Numidium and the Dwemer's foolish ideas are only pale, childish imitations of divine destruction, just as the Daedra are only pale, childish imitations of divine creation.

He turns his gaze Beyond, and lets his Nature and Will align, bloom into a primal joy as he rakes a kitten's claws through the tapestry of Dwemeri ideals and goals and magic and sound. He rends with abandon, expelling every held-back urge to shred and break and anihilate, the dark sweetness of kings and rebels alike being stripped down to naught but their fragile bird-bones of light and desires, and when he settles down, it is with a moon-sharp smile and the darkness of the Void in his eyes.

The Dwemer souls are all there, all whole, and through a fractal-sense of Hist-spores, he senses which of them glow with world-murder, which of them are like the Thalmor and too poisonous to feed to the maw that birthed him. His shehai coalesces into being, a writhing snake that snaps into form, sun-gold starlight shaped like his bones and flame-wraithed with the anger of his bloodline antecedents, and he shifts into position, angles the sword very precisely, and swings.

Reality splits as he cleaves Numidium and Kagrenac's fools from existence, sends them into the utter self-anihilating realization of the true face of the Void. He knows that they can't survive that truth veiled behind mysteries, just as he knows to brace for the backwave that sweeps him, Vehk and Cyrus against the ship's deck. For one moment, he sees world-stories settle on their pages, losing their magics as he cuts Numidium out across all necessary times with the precision of Veloth himself, and he laughs, delighted, as glass serpents with wings of lightning and rainbow fractal wakes blink into being, weaving gossamer-line time currents back together, eager to repair the negation-holes where they can.

Their dance of healing is a beauty to behold, and at any moment, now, Sil should act... And as if on cue, ethereal-blue streams of ninth-dimension mathematics carried by Digitalized Mothiculi swarm in, forming an axis that congeals into a long spire of silvered chrome akin to Ada-Mantia, and the world _clicks_ as it falls into place for the next steps in the sequence. The central tower floods with silver and light, and it is only _then_ that Nerevar understands why it seemed so strange before, for being a Tower.

Before him, a tower within a tower at the center of all that is.  
A dwelling, filled with light and curiosity and life once again.  
A God restored from shards poured back into the original matrix and unified.

Dragons made of prisms and storms sweep in and fly them to safe seas as the Adamantine Tower of Balfiera responds to the change in the Aurbis, and he can only stare up as the sky lights up with a thousand thousand shooting stars, streaking forth from the direction of the Iliac Bay, and begin tracing lines and curves behind the Lunar Lattice, a mystic motif just like Seht's bands in the Clockwork City's handcrafted sky.

GHARTOK  
THE SELF-HELD WEAPON, DIRECTED BY THE MASTER OF THE NEXT CYCLE  
FOR HE WHO DESTROYS ALONE CHOOSES WHAT WILL REMAIN, AND WHAT MUST BE MADE ANEW  
HE IS THE ONLY JUDGE IN THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT, FOR HE ALONE CAN GRASP THE GODKILLER BLADE  
HE IS MARKED WITH THE SHAPE OF HIS OWN SELF SO THAT THOSE WITH INSIGHT MAY KNOW HIM  
AND TEST HIM UNTIL ALL TREACHEROUS DESIRE HAS BEEN CUT AWAY


End file.
